Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
One of my favorite jokes is the one where the guy falls off a cliff and catches himself on a shrub halfway down. He looks down and sees rocks and stormy waters a long, long way below. He looks up and screams, “Help! Is there anyone up there?”
“Yes,” a calm voice says. “It’s Me. God. I’ll take care of you. Just let go.”
And the guy looks down at those rocks far below again, looks back up, and shouts, “Is there anyone else up there?”
Falling for Sébastien and choosing to do something about it was like falling—or jumping on purpose—off that cliff. Going back to the U.S. to my Ph.D. program was like catching myself on a good, solid branch on the way down. Everything Sébastien did, everything he was, could count as that calm, sure response that said, “Let go.” And leaving my Ph.D. program and getting on that plane was letting go.
The stupid plane flew too fast. This could have been good, because I would see Sébastien sooner, but Sébastien had no idea. So it was just bad, because it gave me one hour less before I set foot on Paris concrete again and thus plunged headlong into the rocks and stormy water below.
My flight arrived in Paris at 8:00 A.M. Sébastien met me outside customs at nine, exactly five minutes before my plane had been scheduled to arrive. By that point, I was in near hysterics. “You got here on time!” I said. “How could you get here on time?”
“Laura, I didn’t know your plane would get in an hour early and you would be sitting here waiting for me. I thought getting here at your arrival time would give me an hour’s margin while you got through customs.”
“But if you really loved me, you would have wanted to see me so badly you would have gotten here an hour earlier than my arrival time, just in anticipation. You don’t really love me, do you?”
Sébastien looked at me and sighed. “You’re having a nervous breakdown about this decision to come to Paris, aren’t you?”
“And leave my life,” I sobbed. “I left my whole life, and you got here on time.”
It was a bad moment, but we did eventually manage to get through this coldhearted punctuality of his and escape the airport. Grayness hovered a few feet overhead as we stepped outside, so cold it felt as if any minute the droplets of mist in the air would turn into ice. This came as no surprise to me. Sure, it had been sunny all the way across the Atlantic and even over Normandy, but just after I got my hopes up, I had seen the bowl of clouds collected over Île-de-France.